A Biotech Start-Up Promises Immortality. Is It All a Fraud?

New York Times

a day ago

NOTES ON INFINITY, by Austin Taylor
In Austin Taylor's debut, 'Notes on Infinity,' the campus novel is reimagined as a start-up fairy tale: Two college students from different worlds meet, spend their days and nights enjoying a heady exchange of ideas, drop out of school, found a wildly successful company, and flame out in scandal. Zoe, a driven and polished undergraduate chemist at Harvard, takes up with Jack, who at first seems to be a flaky genius in the grand tradition. Together they hatch an idea for prolonging human life, and name their biotech company Manna. One of them is keeping secrets, however, and the speed of their success doesn't allow either the time or inclination to reflect.
Readers will see Theranos and a bit of FTX in the novel's inspiration, allusions that serve to dramatize the psychology of ambition and denial, how fraud can begin as a desperate, temporary fix, and then grow as the cost of the deception builds and builds.
Taylor doesn't make her founders' initial lie explicit until after their fall from grace, leaving the reader to suspect that the whole business has to be rotten but not knowing exactly how or where. Mostly the pages turn themselves, but at times the familiarity of the plot can be grating. This is the challenge of basing any narrative on current events: When you think you know where a story is going, it's harder to see the characters as people. The messy, complex bond between Zoe and Jack gives the events greater texture and dimension, though: They lie to protect not just themselves, but each other.
In this campus novel, the allure of tech entrepreneurship has altered the social hierarchy, to a point. Jack is befriended by a rich student named Carter, whom he later overhears justifying their relationship to his rich friends as they place bets on which of their awkward, outsider classmates will be 'the next Zuck.' When your peers place bets on your future, you become not a friend, but an instrument of their strategy.
After some initial throat clearing, Taylor's fast-paced writing captures the pressure of start-up culture, and the ease with which a founder can be separated from their own creation. Zoe and Jack divvy up their responsibilities to match their perceived talents: Jack as the chaotic scientist, Zoe as the articulate, organized and elegant face of Manna. All public scrutiny will fall on her, while Jack will enjoy the benefits of the tech visionary stereotype.
This fits neatly with their respective upbringings: Zoe's father is an M.I.T. professor and her mother is the renowned hostess of his 'living room seminars,' where 6-year-old Zoe 'would sometimes answer one of his rhetorical questions or proposals in a small, high voice: 'Your reasoning sounds flawed,' or 'Did you check your math there, Daddy?' Everyone thought this was adorable.' Jack grew up poor and neglected in central Maine; Harvard is his chance to escape, until he wants to escape it, too.
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